RIM denied BBX name, redubs new phone/tablet OS BlackBerry 10
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Research In Motion’s next BlackBerry smartphone and tablet operating system won’t be called BBX after all.
Instead, RIM is going with the name BlackBerry 10 after a Federal Court in Albuquerque issued a temporary restraining order against the Canadian company, banning it from using the name BBX, which is a trademark of the New Mexico-based software firm Basis International.
Basis sued RIM in October over its use of the BBX name and rather than continue to fight the suit, RIM announced via Twitter on Wednesday that it’s moving forward with its new operating system under the name BlackBerry 10.
In a tweet regarding the keynote speech at its BlackBerry DevCon Asia developer conference, currently taking place in Singapore, RIM said:
#BBDevCon Asia Keynote: BlackBerry 10 is the official name of the next generation platform that will power future BlackBerry smartphones!^BZ
Basis uses the name BBx — note the difference in capitalization — as branding for its Business Basic eXtended line of software developer tools. The BBx tools are used to build applications that can run on a number of operating systems that use the Java programming language, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X, and Google’s Android, according to Basis, which says it trademarked the name in 1995 but has been using it since 1985.
RIM’s formerly-known-as-BBX operating system has been under development for months and will be the first OS from the company to run on both smartphones and tablets — an approach taken by Apple’s iOS and Google’s new Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
The OS now-known-as-BlackBerry-10 is based on QNX, the current operating system found on the slow-selling BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. RIM recently announced a $485-million loss on unsold PlayBook inventory.
BlackBerry 10 will usher in increased touchscreen-based controls to new RIM phones and the OS will enable BlackBerry devices to run Android apps alongside native QNX and BlackBerry 10 apps, apps developed using Adobe’s AIR software and HTML5 apps.
The software is expected to arrive on new BlackBerry phones and the PlayBook tablet early next year.
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— Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+